H.M. Ball letter, 1871

The Mrs. Claudet to whom today’s letter was written may be pictured on a French vacation in this “Claudet Family Group, Chateau de la Roche, Amboise” artfully staged by her husband, whose gold-rush-era mineral and chemical knowledge of course extended to the then-arcane realm of professional photography (image credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art)

You’ve seen Henry Maynard Ball recently on this website, as a judge absentmindedly misspeaking in Jargon to an Indigenous lady. Now you can read an entire letter he wrote to another Canadian woman in Chinuk Wawa!

From about this same “oh how I wish springtime would arrive” time of year, but a century and a half ago, we have this gem.

(Thanks to the members of the CHINOOK listserv community, where we discussed it a few years ago, and to Sam’s study group for bringing it back to mind. I have further insights now.)

Datelined fancifully ‘Plenty Gold Land’ because both the writer and the addressee’s husband were involved in the BC government’s regulation of gold mining, this is quite an amusing little document. I believe it’s an exceptional record of the Jargon as actually spoken, with slangy expressions and a pinch of pidgin English in the mix. I wonder if Mrs. Claudet herself understood Chinook Jargon, or if the intent was for her husband to translate for her?

Asterisks in my transcription from the handwritten original show my uncertainties in reading, and my guesses at pronunciations.

[1] hayas- and hayu- are used interchangeably as Intensifiers by Mr. Ball, in a way that’s typical of those Settlers who also spoke English. Other folks’ Chinuk Wawa, going way back to the early creolization of CW at old Fort Vancouver, just uses hayas- (from the word for ‘big’) for this. (Hayu-, from the word for ‘much’, separately developed as an Imperfective/Progressive Aspect marker.)

[2]yáka: A 2007 book chapter that I built into my dissertation pointed out that this word in fluent Chinook Jargon is fundamentally “animate” — so it means ‘he; she’ and, in many people’s Jargon, which was fairly insensitive to grammatical number, also ‘they’. So yaka hardly ever means inanimate ‘it’. It’s typically people with a European mother tongue such as English or French who try to use a word for ‘it’ in Jargon. Others use the fluent-speaker’s “null pronoun”, i.e. no pronoun at all!

[3] or: It’s no mistake that conjunction from English creeps in. We find it at Grand Ronde. I expect or was reasonably frequent in Chinook Jargon, but in line with the custom of leaving recognizably English-sourced CJ words out of the dictionaries, we were bound to wind up with relatively little documentation of its presence.

[4] hayu-sáliks dlét: Putting the adverb for ‘really’ at the end of the phrase it’s modifying was a reasonably widespread practice. Chalk this feature of H.M. Ball’s Jargon up to genuine fluency.

[5] We have a nice example here of how “counterfactuals” are expressed in the Jargon: it’s left up to context. This shows us how powerful context is — it’s rarely pointed out in grammatical descriptions of human languages. Here, evidence outside this sentence tells us that Ball is talking about “might have beens”, even though there is no special distinct verb form to specify that viewpoint.

[6] “Papoose”, well known to us from Western-themed fiction, is a genuine Chinuk Wawa word. Aside from Grand Ronde, we seem to find most of our evidence for it in British Columbia.

[7] “His creek Brunette” [I originally misread this as “Brusette”, sorry!] — this is a really frequent alternative word-order for possessives. At the time of writing, I reckon Brunette Creek in New Westminster was still strongly associated with Mr. Brunette, an original settler. Folks probably referred to it in English, we can infer, as “Brunette’s Creek”. Likewise, in Jargon, it would be “his creek Brunette” or, with the even more frequent word-order, “Brunette his creek”.

[8] “Pop water” shows the influence of casual North American English. Before researching Ball’s letter, I hadn’t realized that “pop” as a name for soft drinks goes back about 200 years! Here we find Ball translating an English expression.

[9] “Five Fridays” is another slang English expression translated into Jargon here. In the 1800s it had the sense of ‘grinding, incessant, trying’.

[10] “All-the-same”, used several times here, was a well-known expression in Chinese Pidgin English. Its use here shows us for the millionth time how pidgins coexisted and influenced each other in the Pacific Northwest

[11] “long ice” for ‘icicle’ — in case you didn’t know it, both “long” and “ice” are Chinook Jargon words known from other sources!

[12] remain: Ball looks to be pretty consistent in using < midlight > for ‘stay, remain, still be’. This is a personal idiosyncrasy of his. It doesn’t reflect known patterns of other people’s Chinuk Wawa use.

[13]łax̣áyu*: I’m guessing that Ball really did pronounce the well-known Jargon greeting with an “oo” sound at the end. Several other old Settler sources indicate a spelling of it along the lines of < cla-how-you >, probably showing the power of their erroneous linguistic urban legend that the word came from an Indian saying “Clark, how are you?”

Taking the measure of this whole letter, I find it very fluent Chinuk Wawa.

It’s one of the earliest spontaneous communications that we know to have been written down in the language. (As opposed to attempts at Bible translating, for example, which would be more artificially structured.)

It doesn’t feel forced; instead it reads similarly to casual speech, which was the usual environment for the Jargon in the frontier era.

Even the obviously English-influenced expressions in this letter tend to sound like something that would actually be said in a Jargon context, e.g. asking for a brandy and soda.